Overusing Identities
Do you put an identity column on every table? That might be a bad habit you want to kick, but not all at once. Steve Jones comments on this common data modeling practice.
Randomizing Result Sets with NEWID
Seth Delconte brings us a technique to solve a common request. Using the NEWID function to return a random record from a result set.
Reaching for the Clouds
This past week's news had a lot of news about cloud computing and Steve Jones comments on a few database related items.
IntelliSense Slow to Refresh
IntelliSense in SQL Server 2008 can sometimes not be very intelligent. It’s there to help you can sometimes cause more...
Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 General Maintenance
This document contains steps that will assist you in the day-to-day SQL Server 2008 RTM Enterprise Edition (non-clustered) operations. It defines the basics of standard maintenance and checks for a single Instance of SQL Server 2008, and should be used as a starting point.
Using a Parent Child Hierarchy in SQL Server to Implement a Custom Security Scheme
I have a requirement to implement a custom security scheme where roles and the user's place in the organization hierarchy are used to determine which customers a user can access. In particular the requirements are that a sales person can only access their customers and any other role can access any customer in their level of the organization hierarchy and below. We have a simple hierarchy that is made up of regions and offices. Can you provide us with an example of how to do this?
Timing is Everything
For this Friday poll, Steve Jones asks about storing time values. Should they always be in UTC? Does that solve more problems than it creates?
Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 3 - Collation and Fragmentation
In this final look into his everyday essentials, Laerte Junior provides some useful scripts for the DBA that use an alternative way of error-logging. He shows how to use a PowerShell script to check and, if necessary, to defragment your indexes, write data to a SQL Server table, and change the collation for a table. Being an exceptional DBA just got a little easier.
Experiments with Data Compression in SQL Server 2008
Data compression is an Enterprise Edition only feature that was added in SQL Server 2008. It allows you to use...
SQLSaturday Acquired by PASS – Reactions
The Announcement
On February 2nd, PASS (@sqlpass), here, and Andy Warren (@sqlandy), here, announced ownership of the SQLSaturday franchise brand was transferred...
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 6: Embeddings – How AI Understands
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 5 where we covered notebooks, HuggingFace and fine tuning AI now...
The Book of Redgate: Mistakes
By Steve Jones
This is kind of a funny page to look at. The next page has...
ADF Pipeline Debugging Fails with BadRequest – The Sequel
A while ago I blogged about a use case where a pipeline fails during...
Forums
Why End-User Testing Is Even More Important with AI
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why End-User Testing Is Even...
Dynamic Unpivot
I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...
Writing as an Art and a Job
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Writing as an Art and...
Question of the Day
String Similarity II
What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?
See possible answers